About
My name is Richard DiBona. I live right outside of Boston, MA. I have been programming since 1982 when I saved up my money and got a Commodore 64. Then it was off to college for Computer Science. I went to Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, NY. After that, I lived and worked in the Hartford, CT area for several years. I taught myself the Windows 3.1 API from a book and wrote programs for Windows back in 1991 or so. I then got into Client/Server programming in 1993, using PowerBuilder and SQL Server. I became a consultant and worked at several different big corporations. I became really good at Visual Basic, as that was the language of choice at the time for corporations. I learned how to program for the internet in 1995. During the day, I was doing client/server programming as corporations had not yet embraced the internet. At night, I was teaching myself ASP and writing applications I thought I could sell.
I wrote an application called Realtyware, which was for Realtors to have advanced listing tools. It interfaced with the Multiple Listing Service. At first, it relied on each Realtor’s modem to download listings to their computer, because not many of them had internet when I wrote the first version of the application in 1996/97. I sold several copies and had some fun. Then I updated it for the internet and tried to get funding so I could push it out nationally. Unfortunately, those doing funding were only interested in weird internet ideas that seemed obviously to have no chance at profitability. For example, I remember finding out that one firm would not fund me because they were going to invest $2 million in a dot com which would display a calendar online for college events. I honestly believed that they were joking. Anyway, I ran out of personal money to fund it and had to move on.
The next thing I wrote was called NetRoundup.com. I was aggregating news stories from different websites into one place, long before you could do the same thing on my yahoo or anywhere else now. There were also no aggregating tools at the time so it was not very easy.
Then I wrote software for day trading. I took in real time stock feeds and analyzed over 3,000 stocks constantly to see which ones were breaking into certain technical analysis patterns that I programmed in. I wrote this in C#.net when it came out in 2000 so I could learn that language. It was a great language and the IDE could not be beat, even back then. But it was so platform dependent that I couldn’t see distributing apps publicly and having to leave out everyone with a Mac. I was making okay money using my app in the markets, but then they put in a rule where you had to have $25,000 in your account to day trade. I didn’t have that kind of disposable income, so I stopped trading. Maybe I will rejuvenate that app someday. It was pretty advanced and pretty cool, and the most complex app I had written up until now.
I worked in middle IT management for a bunch of years at a Fortune 140 company, running all of their websites. Then I left there to go back into contracting. I wrote a slick video marketing application for a start-up first using Flash 8 and then using Flex Builder and MySQL.
That brings us to December, 2007. I was thinking about how pervasive spam is in email, and how limiting email is for doing things like sending large files or rich media content. In fact, not only is it limiting, but we all know how email blocks so many images and you can’t send video or files over 10MB. I decided that I was going to re-write email. I was going to allow people to drag and drop images, videos or large files right into email messages and have them send with 100% reliability. No more spam, no more blocked content, 100% message integrity. That is how I came up with the idea for Episend. It is written in Adobe Air and uses PHP and Amazon Web Services as the back-end. No MySQL whatsoever. Check it out and let me know what you think.
On this blog, I will be posting about different things I have learned over the years and giving tips and tricks that I have discovered while putting Air, FlexBuilder, PHP, and Amazon through their paces.